Managing Online Stores

Business Manager, unlike most host-based billing platforms currently available, provides online stores - automatically created websites. These websites display your plans, and also have a shopping cart with checkout to let customers subscribe to your plans. Customer payments are processed by a payment gateway associated with the store. You can have multiple online stores for different currencies, locales, and product lines.

Business Manager ships with the default online store for the United States locale and USD currency. It is available at

https://<host-name>:8443/<your-login>-store.html

Online stores are completely customizable so you can template them to match the rest of your web site.

In addition to online stores, Business Manager offers website widgets. These are little snippets of code you simply drop into your company web site that feature any subset of plans you want in any format you want (listing, drop-down, etc). Because widgets are small snippets of code, they can be dropped anywhere on your web site where you want to sell plans and they require no special templating because they are included in your existing web site. This gives you precise control of the way you like to sell plans.

This chapter explains how to add or edit an online store, how to customize its look and feel, and how to manage blacklists of customers e-mail addresses.

We do not provide store configuration instructions in this chapter, as the configurable options are self-explanatory, and you can easily find what you need by reading about these options when adding or editing online stores.